"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history."
-The Invention of the White Race
If the answer to these questions are yes, in what ways did race change when it was exported to other societies?
According to esteemed US historian Edmund Morgan, the answer is, essentially, yes. At least the implications of a racial hierarchy were "invented." See his groundbreaking 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom, which posits blackness was a "social usefulness" designed to drive a wedge between the shared interests of impoverished white freemen and black slaves.
In the book Morgan details how wealthy white plantation owners contrived a strong sense of racial identity to quell disaffected laborers. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, lower-class whites had worked as indentured servants and, if they survived the grim odds of contemporary life expectancy, could make their own way as planters in an expanding tobacco economy. In the 1630s, however, boom gave way to bust and the mortality rate fell enough to produce a sizable population of disgruntled labor. Their simmering resentment of the upper class exploded in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, which curiously also targeted Indians. Deflective planter elites realized "resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class." They gradually replaced an already diffuse white servitude for African slavery throughout the following decades. This was a more stable exploitation, provided that all of free white society united in oppression of the enslaved blacks. By the dawn of the Revolution, "the men who ran Virginia" could deftly espouse Republican principles of liberty at the expense of black slaves.
Morgan's provocative conclusion, that slavery in Virginia sprung from an inorganic racial construct of the upper class, departed from the existing scholarship. Construct or not, others argued that it existed in the minds of English and American whites long before Virginia. For example, in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), Winthrop Jordan cites sixteenth-century English first impressions of sub-Saharan Africans, in which the former labeled the latter "black," a term of immensely negative connotation. Whether racism enabled slavery or vice versa is a debate stemming from Oscar and Mary Handlin's 1950 essay, "Origins of the Southern Labor System," which posits African-American slaves in the seventeenth century were not treated much differently than indentured whites. Within a decade Carl Degler challenged their notion of latent parity in “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice” and argued that white prejudice ultimately produced and perpetuated slavery. Morgan converses with both sides of the Handlin-Degler debate to inform his thesis, but ultimately faults contrived racism. American Slavery, American Freedom's wealthy post-Bacon planters conspired so that disappointed freemen and desperate slaves could never make common cause.
hi! here are a couple of earlier discussions that may be of interest
Do you think racism was the result of slavery? or whether africans were enslaved because of racism?
.. and a post with to several more, which discuss changing definitions of race in the USA:
How did the Irish, Italians, and Jews become "white" in the United States?